fata morgana
by ncfan
Summary: He could never let her go.


I own nothing.

* * *

"_I can…" That quite distinctly feminine voice is rough and hoarse with coughing, as underscored by the coughing that punctuates her words "…speak English."_

Up to now, Ushiromiya Kinzo has known only two types of women.

First, are the women like his mother and his wife. The women of the aristocracy, proud, distant, cold and chaste. They neither inspire nor encourage love, affection, or even carnal lust. Swathed in endless yards of concealing fabric and barely doing so much as cracking a smile, they are the very picture of female aristocratic propriety. They're more like pretty china dolls you can dress up and sit in chairs than flesh-and-blood, heart-beating people.

The others are the prostitutes of the back alleys. Warm flesh and inviting, roaming hands, the flash of red and a warm laugh. But their smiles are practiced and their bodies like knitted skin stretched across a skeleton. Just objects, even more than those cold, chaste women in the high towers.

But this one, this girl belonging to a land he's always longed to see, she is neither.

When Kinzo first lays eyes on Beatrice Castiglioni, he's convinced she must be a mirage. A golden, lovely mirage. Surely the Italians wouldn't bring a woman with them on such a dangerous mission, especially not the daughter of a high-ranking official as she claims to be. And even when the rest acknowledge her presence, even when she looks at him and smiles faintly, he can't quite accept her as real. Surely such ridiculous beauty can't exist in such a filthy place.

(But when she bestows the favor of her smile on him, even with the dingy light and the smoke stains on her cheeks and the grief in her teeth, that brief flash of white makes his heart jump.)

"_He's probably not happy that I'm monopolizing the pretty lady."_

_Her eyes are too tired to dance, but there comes a dull spark. "Oh? I didn't think I'd receive that sort of compliment here," she remarks lightly._

_Kinzo's lip thins sourly. "I'd be careful, though. None of these men have seen a woman in months."_

"_Hmm… I think I can handle myself."_

The weeks elapse in the same slow, sluggish way that they always do—but this time it's not agony to breathe the air, this time he can look at the world around him and see it as something other than a prison to cage his unwillingly living flesh. He finds himself sneaking off to speak to a woman, something he never did even as a boy. He and Beatrice speak of many things, vain and trivial things (_"I even know that you are the eternal lady," he remarks, whimsical again, and her eyes widen like a child's_), but he's never been able to discuss minutiae with anyone before, and he…

_I feel… _Kinzo puts a hand to his chest, and feels his heart beating fast. _I feel happy._

With her, he's freed from apathy. (_She smiles, and her smiles are so infectious that he can't help but smile too. He'd forgotten what it felt like, and his jaw aches, but he doesn't stop._)

From grief. (_"I feel pain here," she admits, pressing a hand to her chest. Her eyes are glazed and far away. "It's like someone's digging a knife in my chest. But that's not all there will ever be."_)

From the constraints of his language itself. (_Everyone says English is such a clumsy language, that it's too simple and leaves too much out. Kinzo likes it though. English tears down the walls of propriety and distance that Japanese built. And her voice when she speaks it is like…_)

Beatrice is freedom. Beatrice is youth. Beatrice is light. She is so young, no child but still so much younger than he. She is the only thing in the world that seems made of life. She cradles his whole world in her hands.

But there's no way she can be real.

This golden, lovely mirage didn't evaporate when he got close. Still, there's absolutely no way she can be real.

This isn't what reality has been like for the nearly forty years of Kinzo's life. Reality is cold, stagnant days in a gilded cage, spent being pulled this way and that by the Ushiromiya elders, like a doll, like a puppet. They neither notice nor care when this doll-puppet starts to bleed and pull apart at the seams under their unkind hands.

Reality isn't supposed to be this vibrant and memorable. Reality is being married to a wife he feels nothing for, a woman whose visage is harder to recall than the faces of long-dead childhood friends. Reality is having three children who all run together in his head, who matter nothing. If these people laughingly called his family—a wife he did not want and children he did not wish for—live or die, it makes no difference to him.

Reality, and life, are supposed to be things he tries to escape. That's the reason for all his book-reading, all his drinking. That's why he came here, after all—to die, so he wouldn't have to go back to that not-life, so he would be free again.

This is as far from reality as he's ever been. _She's _as far from reality as he's ever been—all friendly eyes and clemency, offering him freedom and mercy for the first time in his life. She's too good to be true. She can't be anything more than a trick of the light. Not real.

(_He wishes with all his heart that she was. And here's another change she's wrought in him—she makes him want._)

But here she is, apologizing for some careless remark that she thinks has hurt him. (_"Forgive me, Kinzo." No one says his name the way she does. And no one else ever lets him forget that he is the property of the Ushiromiya, the way she does._) And here she is, holding out her hand—perhaps offering freedom, or maybe just seeking forgiveness for that meaningless hurt.

Despite knowing that his fingers should just pass through the empty air, Kinzo reaches out for the mirage.

And then, he comes to a miraculous discovery.

Beatrice Castiglioni is not made up of light and illusions. Beatrice Castiglioni has hands made of warm, soft, living flesh. She, the brightest thing in the world, is real. Nothing has been so real to him as she is, and nothing will ever be so real again.

"_Thank you."_

Thank you for being real.

_Beatrice looks confused at that. She can't guess at the double meaning of his words._

"_Since you call me Kinzo, I finally feel like I'm my own man."_

He could never let her go after that.


End file.
